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Situational method engineering: combining assembly-based and roadmap-driven approaches

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Abstract

Because the engineering situation of each information system development (ISD) project is different, engineering methods need to be adapted, transformed or enhanced to satisfy the specific project situation. Contributions, in the field of situational method engineering (SME), aim at providing techniques and tools allowing to construct project-specific methods instead of looking for universally applicable ones. In addition to the engineering method tailoring, necessary to fit the project situation, a customization of the engineering method for each engineer participating in the project is also required. Such a configuration allows a better understanding of the method by focusing on guidelines related to the project engineer’s daily tasks. It also increases his/her involvement in the ISD method realization. To achieve this twofold objective (ISD method tailoring and customization), we propose a framework for SME combining an assembly-based approach for project-specific method construction and a roadmap-driven approach for engineer-specific method configuration. The first step of our process provides support to build a new method that is most suitable for the current ISD project situation, whereas the second step aims at choosing the most adapted path (roadmap) to satisfy the requirements of a particular project engineer within the project-specific method. The two core elements of our SME framework are the method chunks repository and the reuse frame. The former concerns reusable method components definition and storage whereas the latter deals with the characterization of the project situation and the project engineer’s profile. In this paper we start first by presenting our SME framework and its core elements: the method chunk repository and the reuse frame. Then we show how to take advantage of them through our two-step process combining assembly-based method construction and roadmap-driven method configuration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire I3S, Les Algorithmes, Route des Lucioles, BP 121, 06903, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

    Isabelle Mirbel

  2. Centre Universitaire d’Informatique, Université de Genève, 24 rue du Général Dufour, CH-1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

    Jolita Ralyté

Authors
  1. Isabelle Mirbel
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Correspondence to Isabelle Mirbel.

Annexe: Reuse frame

Annexe: Reuse frame

As it has been presented in this paper, the reuse frame is a polymorphic structure allowing to do faceted classification of reusable assets dedicated to method engineering. In Section 2.2.1 explanation was given on how one came to the conclusion that IS critical aspects may always be classified into three main topics: application domain, organizational and human. Starting from this decomposition, each company may populate the reuse frame with its own relevant criteria in order to let ISD crew members adapt the project or company-specific method in a meaningful way for the company. But in this annexe, a reuse frame content is also provided that built from various works made on meaningful criteria with regards to method customization [24, 49]. Figures 14 and 15 show the human branch and the application domain branch respectively. In Figs. 16 and 17 system engineering activities and contingency factors are presented. Finally, Fig. 18 shows the aspects associated to the project management family. The reuse frame provides qualitative information about meaningful criteria for method customisation. Therefore, scales have been used instead of numeric values to qualify aspects. An effort was made to reduce the number of fillers in a scale as much as possible in order to have a clear and easily usable set of aspects. When dealing with large scales (i.e. scales including a lot of fillers) it becomes difficult to select the right filler inside the scale in order to qualify a method chunk. For example, it is more difficult to allocate the right filler to an aspect if its scale is very detailed as {“very small”, “small”, “medium”, “big”, “very big”, “huge”} in comparison if it is only composed of three fillers {“small”, “medium”, “big”}.

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Reuse frame: human

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Fig. 15.
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Reuse frame: application domain

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Fig. 16.
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Reuse frame: system engineering activities

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Fig. 17.
figure 17

Reuse frame: contingency factors

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Fig. 18.
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Reuse frame: project management

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Mirbel, I., Ralyté, J. Situational method engineering: combining assembly-based and roadmap-driven approaches. Requirements Eng 11, 58–78 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-005-0019-0

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